General arrangement drawing

General arrangement drawings (GA’s) present the overall composition of an object such as a building. Depending on the complexity of the building, this is likely to require a number of different projections, such as plans, sections and elevations, and may be spread across several different drawings. They may be referred to as 'location drawings' as they show the location of various components and assemblies within the overall design, but this can be confused with location drawings indicating the geographical location of the building.

They may also include notation and symbols. It is important that these are consistent with industry standards so that their precise meaning is clear and can be understood.

The scale at which drawings are prepared should reflect the level of detail of the information they are required to convey. Different line thicknesses can be used to provide greater clarity for certain elements. They may be drawn to scale by hand, or prepared using Computer Aided Design (CAD) software. However, increasingly, building information modelling (BIM) is being used to create 3 dimensional representations of buildings and their components.